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Friday, 21 April 2017

HEY MR D.J., PUT A RECORD ON

Was there ever a time when hearing music on the radio was
considered rare? Whole services are built around non-stop music these days, but
there was a time when playing out a recording of a song, the same sort you
would buy to listen in your own time, was restricted. This wasn’t considered a
bad thing at the time, until people’s tastes changed.

Put simply, there used to be a system in place named
“needletime,” literally how long records could be played on the radio. This was
a protective measure, as the two groups in charge of it were the Musicians’
Union, who wanted to preserve opportunities for their members to play live, and
Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL), which represented record companies and
music licensees.PPL had been formed
after a 1934 court case, when a coffee shop in Bristol was successfully sued
for playing records for its customers, creating the notion recordings cannot be
played in public without receiving the permission of the copyright holders.

In 1935, the BBC signed its first contract with the
Musicians’ Union and PPL, giving them all of twenty hours per week of
needletime to play with. This didn’t matter much, as the BBC were engaging
bands to record sessions for them, and would start forming their own, with
names like the BBC Concert Orchestra, the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra, and the
BBC Midland Light Orchestra.

[The BBC Midland Light Orchestra]

However, by the 1960s, radio had been relegated to
background listening by the advent of television, and younger audiences were
listening to the pirate radio stations moored in the waters around the UK, and
to Radio Luxembourg in the evening. These stations were outside any agreements
that could be made, and could play as much music as they could get away with.

Once the pirates were made illegal in 1967, the BBC was
obliged to fill the gap with a legal version that used some of the DJs – Radio 1
– and needed the ability to play more records. How many extra hours did they
get? Two per day – on Radio 1’s launch day in 1967, only 5 hours and 35 minutes
of the day was not shared with the lighter sounding Radio 2, a situation that
wouldn’t be broken for the next fifteen years, with only nudges in allowances
in the meantime. No wonder Kenny Everett and John Peel complained, although
Peel’s famous sessions helped to bridge the gap, but when people were able to
listen to their favourite artists freely before, hearing them try to sound the
same live or, even worse, have a cover band do a close approximation of it,
wasn’t quite going to cut it anymore.

[Kenny Everett]

However, there were ways to get around the rules, if you
were prepared to make the effort. Record review programmes, or shows talking
about new releases, were exempt from needletime, so long as they mentioned the
catalogue number you needed to order your own copy; foreign records were
exempt, so coming back from a holiday to the Netherlands with compilations of
hits heard at home was very helpful; and, if you really wanted, you can license
songs directly from the record company, like the BBC did with Motown and other
labels, make your own records, for personal use only, and play them as much as
you wanted.

In 1988, what had become a game finally ended, and radio
stations now pay for music by the minute, or song, or by a percentage of their
revenue. Music is too personal to put restrictions around it, and the situation
now in place means that, in the absence of live music, bands will continue to get
paid for their work – until MP3s and streaming started cutting that down.